The Druid Queen - Douglas Niles [109]
The magic-user tensed, ready for treachery, but then he saw a familiar shape, the glowing wheels bracketing the Chariot of Sustarre, taking shape in the air before the Exalted Inquisitor. Slowly the two horses, prancing eagerly, outlined in fire, materialized.
By the time the cleric took to the air, Alicia had already gone to gather the sergeants, while the wizard watched the final departure of Parell Hyath, the trailing cloud of sparks marking the path of the chariot as the horses lunged into the sky.
Within a few minutes, the men of Corwell had hoisted their weapons and standards to their shoulders and once again resumed the northward trail, accompanied by their chant: "For the kings of Corwell!"
The wizard found Alicia at the head of the column, riding at a fast walk through the once more passable forest. He spurred his old nag up to the side of the princess, lighting up when she turned to him with a smile. Still, a sense of foreboding lingered inside him, and he had to tell her of his twinge of misgiving.
"Good riddance to him, I say," Alicia declared.
"I certainly hope so, but perhaps not," Keane cautioned. "Corwell's to the south of here, Baldur's Gate to the east. Yet when he flew away, he was making straight for the north."
* * * * *
Tavish waited for fifteen painful minutes after she heard the last sounds of firbolg conversation. The rough landing when the giant-kin had dragged the longship onto shore had twisted her spine one final time, and she wasn't at all sure that she'd be able to walk when she did dare to venture out
Nevertheless, she finally crawled forth, wriggling from beneath the bench to lie in the bottom of the hull. Dismayed, the harpist found that she was even more stiff and immobile than she had expected. It took her another ten minutes before she could sit up, and even then her feet remained numb and her arms tingled painfully with slowly returning circulation.
Yet finally she could look around and breathe air unfouled by firbolg feet. White clouds scudded across the mostly blue sky overhead, while a fairly dense forest extended to both sides, just back from the flat and gravelly beach. Above the trees, now with its summit shrouded by wisps of clouds, rose the distinctive cone of the Icepeak.
She raised her head and saw the Strait of Oman to the south, though there was no sign of Gwynneth beyond. It made sense. With no massif such as the Icepeak, the lowland of Winterglen lay below the horizon.
"So they sailed to Oman's Isle," she said aloud. Why firbolgs would do something so unalterably purposeful was a real mystery to the bard. Of course, if this island had been their destination all along, she understood why they'd been so determined to seize the Princess of Moonshae.
But this yielded no further light on the issue of why the giant-kin had wanted to come here in the first place. On that question, Tavish could only muse with steadily growing interest and curiosity. She recalled the stooped giantess, clutching that glorious axe so possessively, and she wondered if the explanation lay with that venerable female.
At length, sensation and control returned to her limbs. Twisting and stretching for a few more minutes, she finally felt ready to climb out of the leaning hull. Sitting on the lower gunwale, she crossed her legs over the rail and dropped the short distance to the smooth surface below, landing with a lurch and a jarring of harpstrings, but she suffered no injury.
Once she had checked her lute, determining that it needed a careful tuning but had suffered no damage, she started across the stones. Her curiosity had grown far beyond the realm of idle interest. She felt that, whatever drew these giants, there must be a compelling tale at the end of it.
The trail of the lumbering giant-kin wasn't hard to find. The firbolg